The first meeting between the leaders of all three parties negotiating to form a government has taken place.
National leader Christopher Luxon and NZ First leader Winston Peters both confirmed the meeting had occurred, posting photos of the two of them with ACT's David Seymour on social media.
The trio met at a hotel room in Auckland on Wednesday morning.
Seymour told RNZ the meeting was "congenial and promising" and they were "really really happy with it".
"It was useful to get all three of us in a room on neutral territory in a place where we can turn three into one for the purpose of delivering a government programme, but also recognise that we have three separate parties".
The meeting appeared to be brief: Luxon was seen leaving his Auckland home about 8.30am, and the meeting was over about an hour later.
Seymour said it did not need to be a long meeting.
"It certainly served its purpose of getting us together and getting that dynamic of us three talking about how we can operate together and how a government can function," he said.
"But obviously each of us have quite a lot of detail to work out with each other in terms of how those particular policies and so on will go."
Meetings and negotiations had been taking place since the election a month ago, but this was the first time all three leaders had met face to face.
The previous day, both Luxon and Seymour had flown to Wellington in expectation of meeting with Peters, but he had remained in Auckland and did not make the trip down to Wellington despite the rest of his caucus meeting at the party's temporary offices across the road from Parliament.
Several NZ First MPs had told reporters at the time they did not know where their leader was on that day.
More to come...
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/502447/coalition-talks-christopher-luxon-david-seymour-and-winston-peters-meet-in-person
-1.jpg)
